Around Kylo Ren's cut form, the fires of her people's destruction raged. Knives sliced through Rey, a great disturbance as she saw flashes of unmistakable grief swarm at the corners of her enemy's darkening eyes.
He knows, he sees.
Somewhere in the crumbling towers, millions of FN-2187s rushed and screamed and burned and died. They were the unlucky ones, she knew, the Finns incapable of loosening the red scarves at their throats and of being reborn in the sands of Jakku. And they were dying, dying at their hands. At her hands, at trembling fingers that held a lightsaber, and it was then she saw the blood dripping from her tanned skin.
Kylo Ren saw it too.
Eyes that have seen, like mine. Eyes that know.
A sweeping gesture, a strangled scream, and he was upon her, slashing with the agony of the knowing. Blows rained down upon her, as she parried with the blade of his ancestors, a hailstorm of something perhaps redemptive, cleansing, a white-hot sear to burn away her sins.
Overhead, nearly imperceptible through the billowing haze of smoke, peered a clear blue highway, cold stars waltzed through wine-soaked galaxies and watched their furious dance with measured eyes. It was something they had seen before and would see again. Beneath their gaze, twin sabers slashed and hacked, nothing beautiful or fluid but passionate, oh, alive like bullet holes in chests and lines of powder at watering holes lost at the bottom of the world. So very alive.
Below, fires blazed around their intertwining bodies. Heat from inside and without powered their footsteps, a dance both away and toward each other's rage, and Rey pondered that the physicality of the flames might be safer than the fury billowing from Kylo Ren's eyes like so many smoke stacks climbing toward the heavens overhead.
I will die here, never to touch the sands again.
Things were cracking, snapping, trees falling like leaves from the heat as they crushed the new-fallen snow. All things were lost. A red lightsaber slashed and ripped and drove her footsteps deeper into the forest, a pair of inhuman, wrathful eyes pinned her mind in place. Death, destruction, and Starkiller Base burned beneath a livid sky. Things were being avenged.
I am dying here.
A single groan and an explosion of light wrenched Rey's feet from a ground that had become alive. She was one with the smoke, a ghostly child, one floating through the flakes and for a moment, all was peaceful. But as her body slammed into the snow-coated ash of the forest floor, she knew there was nothing else. Her eyes found the dancing stars above before a looming figure stole their brightness from her sight.
Take me back to my ancestors.
And the last thing she saw was an immortal gazing at her, triumphant.
